Systematic Procedural and Sensitivity Analysis of the Pattern Informatics Method for Forecasting Large (M > 5) Earthquake Events in Southern California

Recent studies in the literature have introduced a new approach to earthquake forecasting based on representing the space-time patterns of localized seismicity by a time-dependent system state vector in a real-valued Hilbert space and deducing information about future space-time fluctuations from the phase angle of the state vector. While the success rate of this Pattern Informatics (PI) method has been encouraging, the method is still in its infancy. Procedural analysis, statistical testing, parameter sensitivity investigation and optimization all still need to be performed. In this paper, we attempt to optimize the PI approach by developing quantitative values for ‘‘predictive goodness’’ and analyzing possible variations in the proposed procedure. In addition, we attempt to quantify the systematic dependence on the quality of the input catalog of historic data and develop methods for combining catalogs from regions of different seismic rates.